Settling the score.(Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life)(Book Review)

Michael Mewshaw Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life. Louisiana State University Press, 226 pages, $29.95

If you are a pipe-fitter, you hang out with other pipe-fitters, and this is true of writers, too. Writers may not be the most interesting people in the world--I hate movies where we watch characters type!--but they are likely to say witty things on occasion, and, because the stints at the desk can be so draining and arduous, these tend to be short, which leaves literary people free time in the afternoons and evenings to shop, cook, or keep each other company. Graham Greene, one of the many luminaries with whom Mike Mewshaw has crossed paths, punched his ticket by doing a hundred words a day, which doesn't seem like a lot but which, if you keep at it, will make a pile of pages and eventually a book. It had once been five hundred words a day, but then Greene cut that down to three hundred, and then one hundred, "just to keep my hand in"

That is the sort of valuable nugget that Do I Owe You Something? provides in abundance. For that, alone, the book is worth reading. But there is also bitching, which is what writers spend a lot of their free time doing. Much of it turns out to be justifiable. Mewshaw recounts, for instance, how he got treated shabbily--and dishonestly--by William Shawn at The New Yorker. Mewshaw had written a piece about Greene for Playboy which turned it down and paid a three hundred dollar kill fee. He collected "a fat sheaf of rejection slips;' from The New Yorker among others, then placed the article in 1997 in The Nation for seventy dollars and in London Magazine for thirty pounds. In 1979, The New Yorker published Penelope Gilliatt's piece about Greene, much of which was lifted nearly verbatim from Mewshaw. Elizabeth Pochoda at The Nation was unwilling to ruffle The New Yorker's feathers, so Mewshaw consulted a lawyer, who suggested that he send Shawn a list of parallel passages "and trust him to do the honorable thing." What Mewshaw wanted was an acknowledgment that the magazine had used his material, and whatever they normally paid for a profile. Shawn offered a thousand dollars but was afraid that Ms. Gilliatt was in a precarious state and could not stand another humiliation. If Mewshaw would forgo the acknowledgment, he'd go up to two thousand, and he offered his personal apology.

What he didn't offer was the information that there had been another claim against the magazine over this same profile--Ms. Gilliatt had also ripped off Judith Adamson's article about Greene in Sound and Light. And what Mewshaw learned later, from Renata Adler's memoir Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, was that a factchecker had found the parallels to his article in The Nation and had called them to Shawn's attention. So it wasn't "unconscious plagiarism" as Shawn had claimed, but theft, for which there ought to have been punitive damages.

There are other villains--Lewis Lapham at Harper's, for one, who assigns a piece on Italy, accepts it, has it set in galleys, and then changes his mind. He asks Mewshaw to cut it in half and take a thousand dollars rather than the originally promised three. Mewshaw agrees and makes the cuts. Then Aldo Moro gets kidnapped and shot. Lapham has held the piece and now wants further rewrites, including a discussion of the Moro incident. Mewshaw asks for an additional payment, but "Harper's dismissed this idea and me with a brusqueness that indicated no desire for further communication." The Random House editor Albert Erskine turns out to be a tepid friend (but then he was a publisher). Mailer is ... Mailer, which is to say, "a prisoner, not of sex, but of a fictional character he had permitred to body-snatch him."

There are heroes, too. Mewshaw's experiences with George Garrett, ...